My yearly ski season video took a long time to finish this year but is finally done. The amount of footage I captured was way more than in past years, and I lost interest in the project during the summer months. But in the end I'm happy with how it turned out. This makes 4 years in a row!

Last season was horrible for snow on the west coast but trips to Japan and Alaska helped make it an amazing winter. I ended up with 30 days on snow which is more than I've had since high-school days!

My favorite part about making these videos is being able to watch the ones from previous years and gauge my progress as a skier. With improvement in mind, here are three goals for this upcoming (in-progress) season:

Be able to consistently land a clean 360. At the end of last season I was still having a lot of trouble getting keeping my weight forward.

Ski bigger lines (like AK) with more speed and power. The Blizzard Spurs I just picked up should help give me confidence there unlike the jibby and playful Line Mr Pollard's Opus that I've been using.

The first real product I ever worked on, HipCal.com was "launched" a decade ago today. I use quotes there because it was a pretty uneventful launch. We uploaded a few hand-selected PHP files to our shared webhost via SmartFTP and then posted a barebones blog post. I have no memory of what we did after that, but it certainly didn't involve pitching tech blogs, posting on social media, or sending out an email blast. I don't think we even had a way to see how many users had signed up besides manually running a SQL query from the ugly cPanel admin interface our host provided.

It's fun to look back on this as a way to measure how much we've all learned since that point. Members of the team have since gone on to found HipChat, ToutApp, and Balanced, among other projects.